


Nylon, Iodine, Nitrile

by Eustace (Sibylline)



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Catholic Guilt, F/M, Medical Procedures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-26 00:10:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3829978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sibylline/pseuds/Eustace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In response to the kink meme prompt "The feel of thread pulling through his skin and the smell of iodine and the sound of Claire's voice."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nylon, Iodine, Nitrile

.  
He's on Claire's floor again. He's bleeding again. He's fallen through her window again. 

He's concussed, he thinks, ears ringing and it's hard to call it double vision when he's blind, but the world seems blurred, underwater and still burning, covered in an oil slick and set aflame. 

She hears him when he hits the floorboards, says his name in a voice still rough with sleep, flips on the lights and grabs her kit, asks him if he can move to the couch, asks him where he's hurt.

It was a Russian with a crowbar, trying to unzip his braincase and failing by a couple of inches. His cheek is pressed to the floor, and he could move to the couch but he'd rather stay here, he'd rather stay pressed to something steady while the world shakes around him. Everything's spinning and he's tired, he's so tired.

He's saying these things aloud, he realizes, cause he's split his lip open again, can taste the iron and feel the heat against his tongue. His mouth is leaving blood and spit and dirt on Claire's floorboards.

There's a snap of nitrile gloves, and Claire's hands are skimming over him already, shears a shivery thin line from navel to sternum, throat to wrist as she clips the shirt from him. The heat of her fingertips bright like tracers on his skin, finding the bruises blooming across his ribcage, the laceration on his bicep, pressing along his hairline through the slick of blood to find the gash over his temple. 

Her touch is efficient, sure, wastes nothing in tenderness. The scent of the hospital lingers sharp on her skin under the softer smell of lotion and soap. The smell of antiseptics and disinfectants, a scalding cleanness. He imagines that she's a force to be reckoned with on shift at the ED. He imagines that she'd be a force to be reckoned with almost anywhere. She's not here to be gentle, she's here to get shit done. 

Still. He can lose himself in her touch and voice, in the sharp smell of the iodine she's uncapped. She holds pressure to the head wound for a minute or two before she starts swabbing with iodine. The smell is sharp and sour, and tastes yellow-edged the way it feels when the iodine burns the open edges of his flesh. 

Claire's movements are precise, needle piercing through skin without hesitation and at a perfect ninety degree angle, the drag of nylon through flesh. the cold brush of the needle driver and the tug as she makes the knot, squares it, finishes. 

The way her hands stay steady, her heart beat stays steady, the drive of the needle stays steady. There's a ritual to this. He can't decide if this is penance or forgiveness, but he'll bet that either way it's a sacrament that he doesn't deserve.

..... 

She's moved on to the cuts across his forearm, where he'd caught a knife blade meant for his throat. It's still bleeding, sluggish. 

She's on the last few stitches.

His eyes are dark and wide. She wonders whether he knows that there are multiple biological pathways to dilation of the pupils. Matt's pupils are non-responsive to light, but the thing is, they dilate like any other human's in response to arousal. And in the half-light of the living room, his eyes are huge. 

The black suit that he wears is good at hiding blood, leaves just a wet sheen under the streetlights. On her living room floor, when the shirt is a ruined husk that she's cut from him, and the mask is a sodden rag seeping on her floorboards, the blood is stark against his pale skin. 

She can follow the lines of her sutures and their work across his body, like the lines on a map. A cartography composed of the neat lines of scar tissue, the bristling black tracks of sutures, tracing over the mottle of bruises and the topography of muscle and bone. 

And beneath that, the rise and fall of his chest, panting in pain and struggling to even his breathing, the shiver of his muscles under her hands. It's a map that she doesn't know how to read, not yet.

"Do you enjoy this?" she says. 

Not angry, not judgemental, just the edge of curiosity in her voice.  
She doesn't stop suturing. 

......

"Which part?" he says. 

Because he doesn't enjoy inflicting pain, but they've already established that. And Murdochs are made to take punishment, to take a punch and take a beating, and he doesn't enjoy it, precisely, but doesn't mind it, in a way, bearing that pain. He knows how to carry it.

"This," she says, pulling flesh taut to trim a suture.  
"Being stitched and taped and put back together after you've been taken apart."

And that's a tangled question, because he's on the edge of arousal, and it's hard to tell which part of it is the dregs of adrenaline from the fight, and which part of it is Claire's hands and her voice, and which part of it is loving the burn of iodine and the drag of nylon tightening through torn flesh.

Maybe it's the way that everything is too much, and the way that the world tightens down to the the burn and the stitches laid down across his body. The way that the spinning world tightens down to this one still place between the dip of the needle and the sure press of her hands. Maybe it's that devil in him, under his skin and clawing to get out, and she keeps stitching it back in.

 

He's silent for a long time, stumbling on his thoughts. "I don't know," he says, "I think I do."

She nods, and he can hear her heart beat just a little faster. She finishes the final suture and lays down the tools. They won't take it far, not with a head wound, a concussion, stitches that she won't allow to be pulled out. They'll take it far enough. 

Claire says, "you know that thing about not letting people with concussions go to sleep is bullshit. Just have to wake you every two hours. But we can stay awake for a little while longer."

She leans down, skates her fingers across his bruised cheekbone before she presses her mouth to his, cupping his cheek with a hand still gloved in nitrile, still overlaid with the iron tang of his own blood. He cards his fingers along her hair, he moves and feels the tug of his stitches and the rusty crackle of dried blood. 

Matt kisses her deeper, hot and messy. His lip splits again and the kiss tastes like pennies, feels like pressing his tongue to the copper of an electrical wire. He doesn't think that he ever wants to stop. 

.


End file.
